*Specifically, the 12 months from Essen 2017 to Essen 2018

Welcome to the first in a series of small writeups about the Ding & Dent crew's favorite board games of the last year! I'm Calvin, here's my list (with a little help from Colin the #boardgamebear.)

Five: The Legend of Korra: Pro-Bending Arena

As bending is about turning the elements to your will, TLoK:PBA is a game of alchemizing ‘draw 3 cards, play 3 cards’ into a rapid-fire avalanche of flow-like-water move and countermove. 1v1 games have to do a lot to get into my good graces given that Netrunner has the top spot on lock, but Sen-Foong Lim and Jessey Wright manage to infuse every moment with ‘stay rooted and defend or fire up and unleash flame?’ Wait out your opponent's big hits, sacrifice two of your players, then springing forward off your back foot into a relentless counterassault with an unstoppable wall of rock. An incredible design with more depth than still water.

Four: Dice Hospital

Stan Kordonskiy and Mike Nudd have designed a game that let me articulate my long time love of hospital management simulators: they assume that every disease, malady, and affliction, no matter how dire, can – given the correct application of brainpower, resources, and time – be cured.

It’s an abstracted fiction, but a very comforting one. I love this game for letting me cathartize my hatred of hospitals into the cold calculations of ‘yes, I CAN save EVERY patient. There is always a way.’

Three: Wildlands

Defending an attack in Martin Wallace’s Wildlands is like blocking your opponent’s axe by grabbing the blade – either the best thing you could have possibly done, or the first of many, unrecoverable mistakes

Attacking is pretty much the same. And moving. And scoring points. And playing interrupts. Or not playing interrupts. A game where the most damage you can ever do to one target is ‘2’ means every tiny decision magnifies and splits into razor-edged shards of choice – while never being too punishing or unforgiving - though this is mainly through the cutesy-fun aesthetic.

Wildlands is the simplest tactical combat game I’ve ever taught, and it’s far up there among the best. AND YOU CAN BE AN OWL.

Two: Anachrony

I was destined to like Richard Amann, Viktor Peter, and Dávid Turczi’s Anachrony – hyperaesthetic time travel with mechsuits! – but I did not expect it to become my second favorite eurogame of all time. In my review I likened the game to the gears ticking away in a finely machined watch, each element so tightly wound into each other element that to remove one would cause springs to go everywhere. It is a masterpiece of thematic eurogame design. Play it ASAP.

One: Twilight Imperium 4th Edition.

Twilight Imperium is at the apex of every genre it’s in; the only game I think that every single person should play at least once. Its reputation for being a fractal lattice of rules and complexity is mostly unfounded - Fourth Edition in particular lasers away all the flash and guff to leave only the carbon-fibre heart, tuned by two decades of revision and streamlining (spearheaded in 4th edition by Dane Beltrami and Corey Konieczka.)

In my review for The Five By, I described TI as a machine that turns time into stories. There is nothing like it. You have to play it.

Calvin's Best 5 Board Games of 2018*

Calvin Wong

Overcome a tsunami of trash in Ocean's Crisis; a co-operative family-friendly board game.

Episode 84 - Fireball Island Review

Episode 83 - The State of Dungeon Crawlers

Raf Reviews - Big Easy Busking

Episode 82 - Ding & Dent 2018 Awards Show

Raf's Top 5 Games of 2018

Episode 81 - KeyForge Review

Raf Reviews - Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig

Episode 80 - Holiday Gift Giving Guide